Scenario-Based Usability Engineering

Usability Engineering: Scenario-Based Development of Human-Computer Interaction is a radical departure from traditional books that emphasize theory and address experts. This book focuses on the realities of product development, showing how user interaction scenarios can make usability practices an integral part of interactive system development. As you'll learn, usability engineering is not the application of inflexible rules; it's a process of analysis, prototyping, and problem solving in which you evaluate tradeoffs, make reasoned decisions, and maximize the overall value of your product.

Features

• Written by prominent HCI educators who understand how to teach usability practices to students and professional developers.
• Interleaves HCI theory and concepts with a running case study demonstrating their application.
• Gradually elaborates the case study to introduce increasingly sophisticated usability engineering techniques.
• Analyzes usability issues in realistic scenarios that describe existing or envisioned systems from the perspective of one or more users.
• Emphasizes the real world of usability engineering-a world in which tradeoffs must be weighed and difficult decisions made to achieve desired results.
• Includes a companion Web site which provides additional case studies in a multimedia format, along with a Java application for creating and editing scenarios. This site also provides instructors with sample syllabi, lecture slides and notes, in-class exercises, solutions to textbook exercises, additional project ideas, and links to other HCI resources.

Contents

• Foreward
• Preface
• Color Plates Following Page
• Chapter 1 - Scenario-Based Usability Engineering
• Chapter 2 - Analyzing Requirements
• Chapter 3 - Activity Design
• Chapter 4 - Information Design
• Chapter 5 - Interaction Design
• Chapter 6 - Prototyping
• Chapter 7 - Usability Evaluation
• Chapter 8 - User Documentation
• Chapter 9 - Emerging Paradigms for User Interaction
• Chapter 10 - Usability Engineering in Practice
• Appendix - Inferential Statistics
• Glossary
• References
• Figure Credits
• Index